Mysteries we can’t stop thinking about

The wildest stories that never made it into our episodes. Until now. Guests: Amy Boddy, anthropological scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Jayme Locke, transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Jonathan Jiang, research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  Anyone who listens to Unexplainable knows that music is really important to me. So I want an amazing sound system, but I also want something that's easy. It just works. Sonos delivers on all fronts. The sound is incredible, and my Sonos system follows me wherever I go. I can mix and match speakers in any room in my apartment, louder in the living room, quieter in the kitchen. And the Sonos app makes it all super easy. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's Unexplainable. I'm Noam Hassanfeld, here with Thomas Lu, who's a new producer, joining us from NPR, from Bloomberg, from HBO. Welcome, Thomas.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Howdy, howdy.

• 1:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, Thomas, you've been working on a lot of science shows before. What's it like now that you're with us, just focusing on the unanswered parts? Just living for the questions?

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's one of the most intriguing and exciting parts for me, is that I feel like a lot of my science work has been, what is the answer? What is the explanation? But for this, it's like, what are the things people are asking? What are the things people are curious about? And I'm, I'm here for it.

• 2:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we wanted to welcome you in by giving you a tour, so to speak, of some of our favorite episodes, kind of take you behind the scenes and show you the pieces of the stories that, in a way, kind of made the stories what they are, but didn't end up in the final cut. Like, I'm sure you've heard about killing your darlings.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  And it's really tough, right?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  It's so tough.

• 2:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  There have been many times when I've done like mountains of research on a story. I've talked to 20 different scientists and I only have room for two. I lose an entire storyline that I was in love with, but it just doesn't make sense for the scope of the story.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  But today is the day for our darlings. Justice for darlings.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Justice for darlings.

• 2:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we are going to talk about some of our favorite bits that didn't make it in. And we've got three darlings for you this week. One for me, one from our senior reporter, producer, Byrd Pinkerton.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  That's me.

• 3:03Noam Hassenfeld?

  And one from our producer, Mandy Went.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Hey, Thomas.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Let's go.

• 3:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, Bird, you're up first with a darling.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Oh, OK. So last year, Thomas, we did a whole series on pregnancy mysteries, including an episode where I lightly bullied my mother to tell her a little bit about something called microchimerism. So a chimera, in myth, right, is this creature that has a lion head and a snake tail and a goat body. But in the episode, I spoke with Amy Boddy, who is a wonderfully named biologist at UC Santa Barbara. And she explained that in biology, a chimera is something kind of different.

• 3:52Speaker 05

  It's multiple individuals existing in one host body.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  So essentially, like, whenever you have a living thing that's made up of pieces of more than one individual, that is a chimera. You can find them in plants, in animals, and you can even find them in humans.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Like, if you see organ transplantation or something like that, where you have, like, a large tissue, right, that's from someone that is a completely different individual, you can consider that person a chimera.

• 4:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's like a human collage.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  It's not quite as exciting as a human with like a goat head, right? It's just sort of one person who contains bits of two genetically different people. And then, as we explained in the episode, a microchimera is that on like a tiny scale. Because in the womb, we swap some number of cells with our birth parents. So like, my mother gave me some of her cells, I gave her some of my cells. I might be a tiny bit chimerical. And if you want to hear more about that, you should listen to the episode. But as we were talking about chimera, Amy Boddy kind of casually mentioned this other story that blew my mind.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  So this is the darling that I could not fit. But now, today, the grand unveiling of the chimera story that has haunted me for over a year.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  So our story begins in the early 2000s with this woman who was living in Washington State. And she had three kids, but she wasn't employed. So she applied for assistance from the state. And as part of this process, apparently, the state wanted to make sure that her boyfriend was actually the bio dad for her kids. So her family was kind of tested to prove that they were all related. And when the DNA test came back, they showed that her boyfriend was the father and her kids were related to each other. But the tests also showed that this woman was not the mother of her three kids.

• 6:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  What?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  How's that possible?

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Right. Like, she was the mother of the three kids. Like, she gave birth to them. She had a doctor who was present for the births, right? He said he would testify that he was there. She had like photos of herself pregnant. She had their birth certificates. But these tests were coming back and saying like, you're not a match. And so the state was like checking her out for potential welfare fraud. They were threatening to take her kids away. Like, this was really awful. But eventually, after some more testing, they were able to show that she was related to her kids. So according to National Geographic, in the kind of initial tests, the ones that did not

• 6:51Speaker 03

  match, they were using DNA from like skin, hair and blood. But when they looked at a cervical smear, the DNA did match her kids. So like, why would the DNA in her hair, say, be different from her cervix? Like, this was very confusing. But as Amy told me.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  She was a chimera.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  So in theory, what was believed to have happened is that she had a twin, another fertilized egg with with different genes. And the two eggs might have fused together and turned into one person.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  In that case, it blows my mind because which one, which one is, is her?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  So this woman might kind of be both herself and her own twin. And so different parts of her have different DNA.

• 7:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Just so I can make sure I'm understanding this, when she was just an egg inside her mom, there was another twin with her?

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  And those eggs potentially fused, like, so she is potentially two quote unquote people?

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  But then also, the other thing that this made me think is like, she didn't discover this until they tested it. Like, I could potentially be my own twin.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Are you trying to tell us something, Bird? Is this your coming out?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Like, who knows? It's not something that that we like test for very often.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  I mean, I feel like this is all ripe for a very good movie.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  It feels like it was, it might have been ripped from the headlines and turned into like a CSI or Law and Order thing.

• 8:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  But I think just sort of philosophically, it raises these really fascinating questions about like oneness or where you begin and someone else ends.

• 8:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I'm curious, Bird, why?

• 8:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  This didn't make it in and why it's also stuck with you for so long.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it didn't make it in because if you introduce the idea of like, a person can contain their own twin, it's like hard to then focus on-

• 9:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  On anything else.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Like, it's just one of those things where sometimes you remove a darling because it would just derail an entire episode because you spend the entire rest of the episode being like, "I'm just thinking about the twin thing."

• 9:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yup.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Um, but I think I've, I've been thinking about it because it makes me think a lot about the borders of a person, I guess. Like, where do you begin and where does someone else end? This complicates what seems sometimes like a really simple set of boundaries in a way that I find really fascinating.

• 9:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  We have two more darlings for you, Thomas, but would it be okay if we take a quick break first?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  I agree, but my twin.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 9:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Okay, so we'll be back in just a sec.

• 10:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 10:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room, but you gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 10:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 10:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this like truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know if I want to head outside for a minute. It's super easy and yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system.

• 11:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from TikTok. Being curious is endlessly rewarding. There are few better feelings, in my opinion, than asking a question and then having that question lead you down a rabbit hole. Might even be the beginning of a new set of interests that was not on your radar beforehand. Maybe you're looking up at the night sky one night and you start to wonder what the most distant thing you can see with a naked eye is. One place to start searching for answers to a question like that is TikTok. First, you might discover a video about the Andromedic galaxy. And then, next thing you know, you're learning how to find different stars or how to identify constellations

• 12:32Speaker 03

  or how different astronomical discoveries got made or how constellations got their names. You don't need serious equipment to make serious discoveries. Start with a simple question and suddenly you're somewhere you never expected to be. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore. At tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 13:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, so we're back with Thomas, with Bird, with Mandy, and we've got two more darlings to bring back from the dead. Mandy, you are up.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  All right, so the darling that I am bringing back to life is related to a story I did a while ago, Thomas. It was about how there aren't enough organs for the people who need them. Like, in this country alone, there's something like over 100,000 people just waiting for a new heart or lung or kidney, and 17 people die every day just waiting for one. So I spoke to surgeons who are trying to put genetically modified animal organs into people.

• 14:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wow.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  Which is, you know, in this case, another kind of chimera. They're working with pig organs specifically because pig organs, they're actually pretty similar to ours. And if scientists can get these pig organ transplants to work, the idea is that there could be an almost endless supply, which sounds great, but they haven't quite figured out the science yet.

• 14:58Noam Hassenfeld?

  For sure.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Scientists have been experimenting on animals to figure out the right kind of like immunosuppressant drugs or the right gene edits they can make to these organs to basically get our bodies to accept them. And so they've Put pig organs in monkeys, but you know monkeys aren't people.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  And so here's what I didn't really get into into this original episode is I also talked to surgeons who are trying to put these pig organs into brain dead human bodies.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  And the idea here is that the brain dead are closer to living people than animals are.

• 15:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Just to be clear, Mandy, when you say brain dead patients, that means the rest of their body seems to be working fine, but they are dead.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a little complicated. They're technically and legally considered dead. They have no brain activity, but their bodies are still functioning. Like their heart is still beating. But to remain in that state, they have to be like hooked up to machines.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  But it's also just a really weird like gray space to do research on brain dead bodies. Because it's not something that's done regularly in science at all.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  We know how to design and do ethical experiments on animals and, you know, clinical trials on people. But with the brain dead, not really.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Do they, how, hmm, how? Hmm. Because I guess if you are going to do an experiment on someone's body after they die, they still have to have given consent in their life, right?

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Like, that's a really good question, and I think there's not like any firm regulations around how to do this.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  But how, like?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Who's giving them, who's like saying, here's a body. My aunt is here and ready for your testing.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  Yes, so let me explain. I'm going to continue my story.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Okay, sorry, sorry.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  And then it will revisit some of those things. But these are great questions.

• 16:48Speaker 03

  We have a lot of questions about this, darling.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Okay, one of the people I talked to for the story that didn't make it in. Her name's Jamie Locke, and she's a surgeon who did the first ever operation of putting a genetically engineered pig organ into a brain dead body.

• 17:02Speaker 06

  I will admit, I had a lot of reservations about it. Was it the right thing to do? Was it the ethical thing to do?

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Because this research is rarely done, there's not really any sort of like regulation or rules.

• 17:14Speaker 06

  We don't know all the risks, right? We, we, we don't. We, we think we do, but we don't because it just hasn't been done.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So she actually had to come up with her approach kind of from scratch?

• 17:26Speaker 06

  We felt very strongly that before we did anything, we really needed to get an external ethicist.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  To make sure that she and her team did this right. So the deceased was named Jim Parsons and he died in a bike accident. He was originally an organ donor. He wanted to donate his organs, but he wasn't eligible to because of medical reasons. So his family actually agreed to let Jamie and her team study his body instead. So they were worried about how to treat the brain dead body itself in a respectful way. But the immediate biggest concern was how to do this experiment in a way that also respected the living, specifically Jim's family.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  Talking to them about the study, what it meant, what that meant for them, what it meant for them spiritually.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  So Jamie and her team decided to run the experiment just long enough to see if the pig kidney worked and wouldn't get rejected. And once they put the kidney in, it stayed there for about 77 hours. And in the end, it worked. The kidney managed to filter blood and produce urine. And this whole time, Jamie kept Jim's family in the loop.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  We had daily conversations about where we were in the process, how the kidneys were doing, how he was doing, all of those things. And I think that is really recognizing that the donor families are a critical part of the research team.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  What's crazy too is since then, there's been more experiments like this, more pig organs put in brain dead bodies, the longest being sustained for two months.

• 18:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  Two months in a brain dead body?

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Oh my God, that is...

• 19:01Speaker 03

  I think...

• 19:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's just...

• 19:03Speaker 03

  I think this just raises so many...

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  When Brian Resnick and I did an episode about the definition of death and sort of how the line is drawn between someone who is brain dead and who is alive and how tricky, I guess, that that line can be. And I find it interesting how viscerally I feel like I'm reacting to this. There is a part of me that feels deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this.

• 19:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hmm. That's so interesting, Bird, because I have, I feel like I have the opposite reaction. I guess something feels uncomfy here, but I remember talking to Mandy for this episode and so much of this is just stuff that feels like it gives you the ick. But it also feels really helpful and useful. You know, if the argument is between giving a brain dead person a pig kidney to see if it works and an actual living person. To me, it just seems reasonable to try it on a brain dead person and not risk a living person's well being. But I totally, I totally see it, right? Like, this is putting us in a very, very difficult moral and scientific place, for sure.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  I guess the, the living person can agree, though.

• 20:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  I know, I know.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Talking to Jamie, I was so interested in like, hearing how she navigated ethical tensions. And to like, hear about the effort she was putting in really highlighted for me how on the frontier and weird and not usual this kind of science is. And for me, it really made me ask, like, is this going to open the door for more research on brain dead bodies, like maybe in other fields of biology? And what would that mean? And what guardrails should be there? And like, is this going to encourage more people? Like, I think that's a really spooky rabbit hole.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  I can see why this was also a darling that would have derailed an episode.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Because I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time.

• 21:05Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yes, yes. So, okay, I have, I have one last darling for you. I want to take us to outer space.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 21:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  And bring us back to an episode we did on the Artemis program.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 21:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's really cool about Artemis is that it's not just going back to the moon. It's got this much bigger vision. It includes a permanent moon base, an orbiting space station around the moon called Gateway, with the eventual hope that we're going to have a crewed mission to Mars in the late 2030s. And the reason this is such a big deal, which we talked about in the episode, is because everything we know about spending A long time in space is that space really, really sucks. Like, there's just so many ways that space will hurt you and kill you. There's radiation, there's prolonged weightlessness, there's the isolation, there's moon dust.

• 22:00Speaker 07

  I'll tell you, it sure is easy to get dusty, but that's nothing good to anybody.

• 22:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  All the dust on the moon is really jagged because there's no wind. So there's all this audio from the Apollo missions of these astronauts just going like.

• 22:12Speaker 07

  I have never seen so much dust in my whole life, ever.

• 22:17Noam Hassenfeld?

  One of the astronauts, I think he said, you know, we can fix any challenge of space, but we can't fix moon dust.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 22:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, and in the episode, I talked to all of these people, astronauts, writers, scientists. And I asked them, you know, would you want to go on a long-term mission? And they were all basically like, no. E- even people that have been to space. But I did talk to one guy who was very, very into it, like, like so charged up that it, it felt like he was angry if people didn't want to go to Mars.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  If we want to have a future, even if our sun is dead, we got to become multi-planetary species, then we can survive in the long term.

• 23:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I talked to Jonathan Jiang, who's a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, which is this NASA lab that does all kinds of stuff with robotic spacecrafts and deep space exploration.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Heard of it, heard of it.

• 23:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  We talked to him a bit in the original episode. But the part in the episode we didn't really get into was this little bit in the tape there that I just found so fascinating.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Even if our sun is dead.

• 23:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  He's talking about the end of the sun.

• 23:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Eventually, the sun is going to become a red giant. It's going to expand and engulf Mercury and Venus and Earth and Mars. So, you know, if humanity is going to survive billions of years into the future, again, billions of years into the future, we're talking.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  A long time.

• 23:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  We're going to need to make it to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, maybe even further. But Jonathan, he doesn't want to wait millions, billions of years into the future. He published a paper with a few colleagues that tried to estimate how long it would take to get to Jupiter's moons, Saturn's moons further. He is assuming more technological development, more funding, faster ships. But he says that JPL is already working on this. They actually just tested a new ion propulsion engine. It's at least 10 times more efficient than normal rocket fuel. But, you know, overall, he says, quote, "Our model suggests human landings on worlds

• 24:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  beyond the moon and Mars may well be witnessed by many alive today."

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yes, and I'm going to be dead.

• 24:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  You know, I told you that most of the people I spoke to didn't really want to go to space permanently, and Jonathan is a huge outlier. So you would buy a one-way ticket to Mars?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yes, right, yes, yeah.

• 24:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  Why? Why would you want to do that?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  I tell you what, people are going to die sooner or later. So we have a same destiny. Let's say I have a 30 years to live, okay? Now, if there's an opportunity to go to a new place, I start something new, I die there, it's fine with me.

• 25:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, I mean, you are a scientist at NASA, at JPL, like, you know how bad Mars is, you know how cold

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  And how toxic and how far away it is, and you would still say, "I am gonna leave this, like, paradise of Earth and go to Mars."

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:22Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know, I found that kind of mind-blowing because there is something inspiring about someone that looks at this void, this endless, empty void, and says, "I want to put myself into it," right? "I want to think about that void, I want to go into that void." I find that kind of inspiring.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Wait, so, Noam, would you do it?

• 25:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  Wait, wait, would I, like, go to Mars personally?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Hell, no.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Okay. You were swayed, you were like, "Wow, that's amazing, but not me, though."

• 25:51Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, I find it inspiring, but I find a lot of things inspiring that I don't want to do personally.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  That's totally fair, I was just curious. I wouldn't either.

• 26:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe that's just me, I don't know. But I do, I do think, like, there is something here about these, these kind of... Extreme possibilities that there's reason that we don't include them in the original story. But it's worth considering them because they just like, they stick with you. And these conversations that we had with all these people, they really helped us design these episodes, even if they didn't make it in.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Right now, yeah. It feels like these stories are taking you to like the edge of science, but then closer you get, the blurrier it gets.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think also in the moment, there are things that would totally derail a story. But I think it's important to acknowledge that like, in science, sometimes when you follow the things that seem to be derailing the story you're trying to tell, it can be really fruitful and really helpful. Not everything fits neatly into little narratives, but sometimes the things that don't fit are the most interesting.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  We should do more of this. Like, I think in a story, there's a bunch of seeds and we choose one to grow. But what about all the other ones, you know?

• 27:15Noam Hassenfeld?

  This episode was produced by Meredith Hottnott, who runs the show. It was reported by Bird Pinkerton, Manding Wen, and me, Noam Hassenfeld. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, fact checking from Anouk Dusso. And thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating our show. If you have thoughts about Unexplainable, send us an email. We're at [email protected]. And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us find new listeners. You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. You can go to vox.com/members to sign up. And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week for the holidays,

• 27:57Noam Hassenfeld?

  but we'll be back first thing, like January 1st, in 2025.

• 28:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. No matter how much you know about frequency response or harmonic distortion, the thing that's going to make you fall in love with a speaker is how it makes you feel. And Sonos has that it factor. You know, it's this seamless system that makes things sound good in every room. That obviously takes some serious engineering, but it also takes a big picture understanding of how and why we actually listen to things. The birthday playlists, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos: Love the sound, feel the system.

• 28:59Speaker 01

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